Moloch? Pfft! I'm Voting Voldemort!

In the comments recently I did a brief bit of battle with the "government is just a word for all of us working together" shibboleth....

I am on the record as hating most government.

Note that this is not because I think that most people serving in government are evil. I think that most people, in most cultures, and across most times, are more-or-less decent. The problem is best analyzed with systems theory, and best fixed with the same tool.

The government-run horror show that killed Castaneda wasn't because there were mustache-twirling villains; it happened because dozens of people were "just doing their jobs"...

Normal people are perfectly capable of being cogs in machines that engage in madness, if not evil. When pressed, these normal people tend to fall back on the phrase "just doing my job" and a hand-waving version of the just world logical fallacy.

Arguing that we shouldn't be outraged at government because "it's just us" is one of the worst lies we tell ourselves.

Frankenstein's monster was stitched together out of people like us. Nazi Germany was stitched together out of people like us. Mao's PRC was stitched together out of people like us.

And though it's not as bad, the US government is still pretty nasty, and it too is stitched together out of people like us.

We have a terrible capacity, for good or evil. Our founders attempted to put into place a government that would limit the capacity for evil, and encourage the capacity for good. The history of internal politics in the US over the last two centuries bears witness to the fact that this was not a one-time decision, but one that must be made over and over again by each generation.